Jason Collins Refuses to Play in D-League or Overseas

Jason Collins is still hopeful that he will receive a phone call from an NBA team soon, allowing him to relaunch his career as a professional basketball player. According to ESPN, the 34 year old NBA veteran — who became the first publicly gay professional athlete in North America’s four major team sports — has ruled out the NBA’s Developmental League and playing overseas. Collins remains confident that he is still an NBA player and prefers to continue working out at his Los Angeles home waiting for an NBA opportunity to arise as opposed to playing somewhere else.

Former NBA center and current Los Angeles Clippers scout Jarron Collins, Collins’ twin brother sat down in an interview with ESPN and talked about how hard his brother has been working.

“He’s in the best shape of his life,” Jarron Collins said. “I’ve never seen him as physically strong as he is now. So from that standpoint, he’s good to go if he’s given the opportunity and I’m optimistic he will. It’s one of those things where you just have to see.”

“My brother and I feel that the NBA is for the best of the best who play basketball in the world and my brother considers himself to be amongst that group. People’s opinions are going to vary … obviously people have different opinions about that. But that’s my brother’s opinion.”

Many people speculate that the reason Jason Collins has not been picked up by a team is because of the endless media attention they will receive because of his sexuality. Despite this and the fact that he only averaged 3.6 pts and 3.7 rebounds per game during a 12 year career, he still believes he belongs in the NBA.

“Conditioning won’t be a factor in a team’s decision,” Collins told ESPN.com’s Kevin Arnovitz recently. “I’m making sure that my health won’t be a liability.”

“All it takes is one team,” Collins said. “One owner, one team. We’ll see what happens.”

If Jason gets signed to a team it will most likely happen in January when 10 day contracts are allowed. In this case the risk for the team would be very low.

Many are still left to wonder that if Jason does gets signed would it be because of his skills or his sexuality? I do not doubt that a team would sign him just to exploit his personal choices to gain publicity and media attention because numbers do not lie and his career numbers are far from impressive.